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The League of Nations' THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS’ “This law of the modern world, that power tends to expand indefinitely, and will transcend all barriers abroad and at home, until met by superior forces, produces the rhythmic movement of History. The threatened interests were compelled to unite for the self-government of nationa, the toleration of religion, and the rights of men. And it is by the combined efforts of the weak, made under compulsion, to resist the reign of force and constant wrong, that, in the rapid change but slow progress of four hundred years, liberty has been preserved, and secured, and extended, and finally understood.” Lono AWN. HEN in the early days of the war the amateur poli- W tician observed that the futility of The Hague Confer- ence was not proved, he was expressing, more suo, a dis- torted political truth, For at The Hague the organism of a world-state had been disclosed; and the war, which is anarchy among states, demonstrated that the world-state had as yet no life. The League of Nations is the attempt to frame that political organism in order that the inter- national spirit may find in it a home and an instrument; that is, a body. For the international mind is a new reality, and the old State cannot house it. “Nature made men citizens,” said Aristotle. But of what city? To what other men, and to how many of them, are we “naturally’) bound in an association of which the object is government-that is, at the lowest estimate, the enforce- 1 This paper by Miss Rose Sidgwick, prepared for delivery as a discourse at the Rice Institute on the occasion of the visit of the British Educational Mission to that institution, has a peculiar and pathetic interest, for it is one of the last things Miss Sidgwick wrote. At the close of her tour in the United States as one of the seven members of the British Educational Mis- sion, and two days only before she was due to sail for England, she caught influenza, which developed into pneumonia, and she died a fortnight later in New York on December 28, 1918. This paper gives some indication of the loss she is to the world of thought, which, together with the tragic loss of her experience and wiadorn in carry- ing on the work of promoting interchange and understanding between uni- versity students and teachers on both sides of the Atlantic, cannot bc too deeply regretted.-C.F.E.S. 53 54 The League of Nations ment of order and elementary justice? It is habitually as- sumed that for modern times the “city’) of Aristotle is what is called indifferently the “country)) or the “State.” Yet that this should be so is in itself startling, for when Aristotle said “polis” he meant a town like Athens, as big as Ports- mouth, with less than a quarter of the population of Man- chester. The frog is swollen to the size of a bull; is it certain that its anatomy is unchanged in the process? The nation-state first realized itself generally in the six- teenth century, when Catholic unity was rent, and when Machiavelli had taught the secular national governments that they should “suffer neither limit nor equality.” In England the doctrine bore fruit first in internal autocracy; the power which was formidable under Queen Elizabeth became intolerable under the Stuarts, and the three cen- turies intervening between James I and this year (1918) have seen the expansive power, of which Lord Acton speaks, checked by the claim of subjects to “self-government, re- ligious toleration, and the rights of men.” Twenty years ago, English political thinkers felt so secure of liberty that the “State” had again become an idea which claimed only enthusiastic reverence. We were taught that the State was perhaps the most potent of human forces for good, and the name called out from many their best effort and most ardent sacrifice. It summarized the conception of the public good set over against selfish private-mindedness, and of the righteous power of the whole over its parts. In short, we were trained to identify the State with the civic body of which we were members; patriotism in this sense seemed the whole duty of a man. The war revealed the flaws in this conception, which, though clear and easy, is by those very virtues limited to an imperfect view of the truth. The shape given to the idea The League of Nations 55 of the State in Germany, especially in the debased popular form Bernhardi made current, would have repelled most Englishmen even if it had not been put in practice. If, as Treitschke says, “the State is the highest thing in the ex- ternal society of men,” there is no obligation beyond it, morals become identified with law, war is good, and inter- national projects are illusory. Such theories helped the liberal peoples to realize that the national polity does not wholly embody their own moral being; and already the mere shock of the fact of war had branded on our minds the truth that “patriotism is not enough.” The international mind suffered injury. But if the international spirit cannot be confined in the State, what political body can be found for it? There are those who think that only a world-state can logically be expected to fulfil the requirements of this wandering ghost that seeks a home; who believe that nation- alism and patriotism are provincial vulgarities, destined to be discarded. To them the League of Nations is useless because incomplete; it is scarcely a polity, for though it will have a permanent court of law and a “council of concilia- tion” which may possibly also legislate, it may well have no executive, and almost certainly will have no army, navy or taxes. These, however, are deductive reasoners, who start from what seems desirable and pass by the road of logic to their inevitable goal. The modest inductive historian, reasoning from what has been to what seems likely to be, cannot shut his eyes to the achievements and the promise of the force of nationality; and if he is also an economist of human energy, he would prefer a scheme in which room is left for national specialization. Surely, he argues, local political life is a strength, not a weakness, to a nation; cities adorn and strengthen the State; and so may nationalities 56 The League of Nations fortify and enrich the League. At the same time it is essen- tial that it should be a chastened nationality; ex hypothesi, the power of each government is to recognize its barriers, acknowledge its equals, bow down to its superior, the whole. Whether or not the frog can reach the size of a bull and suffer no damage, he must never hope to become the new Great Leviathan. A statesman who accepts the fact of nationalism on the one hand, yet feels the motion of the international mind on the other, sees that his art of politics is discredited by world- anarchy. He sees further, with shame, that the world-soul is finding expression in other materials than his. Why, he may well ask himself, is there a “Universal Postal Union” with an international legislature (the Postal Congress) and administrative (the Postal Bureau) ; why is there an inter- national system to regulate “the technical unity of railways,” the white slave traffic, the adoption for international mo- torists of “four international sign-posts,)’ an international union for the “suppression of useless noises,” and yet no worrd-organization for the most important of human activi- ties-politics ? Nor will he, if he is a right-minded politician (the species is not extinct), be consoled when he observes that the churches suffer the same reproach: no branch of official Christianity keeps its unity unimpaired when its members are nationals of enemy states. He may even wonder whether an informal religious organization like the Student Christian Movement has not a more real international life than the churches. But here, as a cautious theorist, he ceases to speculate on ethical tendencies, and turning to the past, which we are told is so still and plain a page of written wisdom, he studies the lesson of modern history. For four hundred years, Lord Acton says in the pregnant The League of Nations 57 passage quoted above, national power has followed the law of its being and tried to expand, and has been checked by the combination of the weak. He has himself shown the inevitable connection between arbitrary home government and aggressive foreign policy : a connection which, when once suggested, is plainly to be traced in the attempts at imperial domination made by Spain under Philip IT, and by France under Louis XIV, and again a century later by Napoleon.1 Starting from Lord Acton’s view that progress in liberty has come through resistance to such aggression, we may hope to show also that the modern history of freedom leads toward a League of Nations as its natural fulfilment, and that only some such world-polity, however loosely con- structed, can house the world-soul implicit in the theory of democracy. And finally, since the study of these four cen- turies shows that in each case of aggression the tyrant and his victims alike aimed at unity-the one because expanding unity is the law of power, the other because in union alone is safety-the conviction is pressed upon us that a thirst for unity is the urgent force of modern politics; that the im- pulse of the weak toward union is sound; and that in the conqueror’s ambition lurks an implied dualism which fore- dooms his hopes to failure.
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